Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Guantanamo are innocent - tortured for Cheney and Rumsfeld's evil pleasure
Johnny Asia
leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and,
thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any
substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be
immediately released."
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney
fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have
admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."
Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly
had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090319/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_guantanamo_wrongly_held_2
Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Guantanamo are innocent
By ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writer
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent
men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from
noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There
are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who
was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The
Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday,
told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military
commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were
innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information
for a "mosaic" of intelligence.
"It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in
Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know
something of importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence
analysts hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region,
or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or
their plots could be identified."
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during
the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent
with no meaningful attempt to discriminate "who we were transporting to Cuba
for detention and interrogation."
Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on
Wilkerson's specific allegations but noted that the military has
consistently said that dealing with foreign fighters from a wide variety of
countries in a wartime setting was a complex process. The military has
insisted that those held at Guantanamo were enemy combatants and posed a
threat to the United States.
In his posting for The Washington Note blog, Wilkerson wrote that "U.S.
leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and,
thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any
substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be
immediately released."
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney
fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have
admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."
Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly
had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."
Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January
2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists, including
confessed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to
Guantanamo from CIA custody in September 2006.
"We need to put those people in a high-security prison like the one in
Colorado, forget them and throw away the key," Wilkerson said. "We can't try
them because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."
But the rest of the detainees need to be released, he said.
Wilkerson, who flew combat missions as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and
left the government in January 2005, said he did not speak out while in
government because some of the information was classified. He said he feels
compelled to do so now because Cheney has claimed in recent press interviews
that President Barack Obama is making the U.S. less safe by reversing Bush
administration policies toward terror suspects, including ordering
Guantanamo closed.
The administration is now evaluating what to do with the prisoners who
remain at the U.S. military base in Cuba.
"I'm very concerned about the kinds of things Cheney is saying to make it
seem Obama is a danger to this republic," Wilkerson said. "To have a former
vice president fearmongering like this is really, really dangerous."
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